


Wanderlust

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alive Mary Winchester, Angst, Character Study, Gen, Missing Persons, POV Dean Winchester, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 05:12:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8043823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: It only makes sense that if anyone from the Winchesters were to go missing, it would be Sam.





	Wanderlust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [millygal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/millygal/gifts).



> Written for milly_gal, for the prompt Sam and Dean, separated for years. This is one of those fics that became something else while I wrote it. IDK where Mary came from? (!)

There’s no goodbye, no looking back. Those who vanish do it the way soap bubbles do—there, and then not. Too soft to really make a _pop._

Dean has a theory about alien invasions. Sam has a theory about parallel universes that take a loop into fae-abduction and circles around Roanoke.

But it’s not a town that vanishes.

It’s people.

It’s a girl walking out of a bus at the wrong stop, a boy walking out a cabin door, a doctor walking out of an airport at a stopover between home and a conference. People have quietly disappeared into roadside graves and sharp corners for centuries, but not _people like this,_ says Sam. People like them, maybe, hunters and night workers and truck drivers navigating the dangerous pinball paths of the interstate system, but not safe, loved, white-collar workers. Not some rich actor’s kid. Not like this.

He and Sam can’t keep it under wrap for long before the police notice, and then the media. The numbers tick up. More hunters get on the job. Somebody mentions serial killers, but the disappearances are worldwide, and no serial killer travels that far in that short a time without superpowers. And superpowers—well, supernatural.

On July the 4th, Sam shows up at the bunker with armfuls of fireworks. Dean meets his gaze and Sam cocks his head a little, smiles a little embarrassedly, mumbles something like _what can it hurt._ They go to a field a small distance from the bunker and set them off. The fireworks make delightful whizzing and flapping noises, the white and green and gold falling around them like a rain of gemstones. A night bird warbles somewhere, frightened by the noise. Dean throws one as far out as he can and it tangles in a tree and fizzes out. He’s a little annoyed at that stupid firecracker but it cracks Sam up, and he finds himself grinning anyway.Their shoulders press together and Sam’s fingers thread through Dean’s, and they’re both embarrassed when the last rocket shudders out into fierce pink streams of light.

The next day Dean wakes to a strange sort of feeling. Sam could have gone for a run, or he could just be doing a grocery run—he could be doing any million normal things. But even when he’s just putting his clothes on (slowly, no need to hurry, this case has produced no leads for several months) and getting coffee made (for one), he knows.

Sam’s gone.

*

Dean and Mary and Jody quarter the States. They each take one-third, and give one-third to Cas. Cas is done with his in a day, and volunteers to search other places, other non-places. Dean finishes up his (too quick—he’s done this too many times and it feels horridly routine) and joins Mary. She listens to weird podcasts and hotwires tiny cars. She calls on favors from hunter families Dean never even knew. They stop at diners and she picks at her food. She’s been back with the living for less than six months and already they’ve lost Sam twice. They found him once—Mary’s not Dean to know, in her gut, that they’ll find him again. What else do they do?

They don’t talk much, but somewhere in Connecticut, they start talking about Sam.

Mary knows about Jessica. And Stanford, and Cold Oak, and everything else. They don’t say it out loud, but Dean knows they’re both thinking it: that Sam’s always been hit with more supernatural crap than Dean or Mary, and in a sick way, it sort of makes sense that he would be the one to vanish in their family. Like Sam’s been destined for it. Sam Winchester, and the Roanoke gene. Has a ring to it.

Mary knows Dean knows about the deal she’d made with the Yellow Eyed Demon.

“I read the books,” she says. “Easiest way to catch up, what with you two playing the pronoun game.”

Sam’s idea, actually—something he hadn’t discussed with Dean. Give Mom a Kindle Fire, pre-loaded with enough Amazon gift-cards to purchase the e-books. Now Mary reaches out to turn up the volume on her podcast.

“I made notes.”

Dean is a little terrified: will her questions be multiple choice? ( _Given an option between letting Sam die and starting the domino effect that would kill Kevin and Charlie and who knew how many others, what would a logical conclusion be?_ _A. Stop playing God. B. Stop playing God.)_ Or will they have more of a descriptive pattern? _Explain what cause and effect relations led to the apocalypse clusterfuck of 2010._

But Mary only asks, “Does Sam really like the reboots?”

Sometimes, when she thinks he’s not watching her, she watches him warily as she would a threatening stranger. Sometimes, when she thinks he’s not watching her, she watches him like he’ll never be anything to her but her baby.

Dean’s not sure which is worse.

*

Dean doesn’t like talking to the other families but everyone else seems to think it will help. There’s a support group that has meets all over the country. The one they go to is held in a brittle, dusty room that smells vaguely of gym socks. Everybody speaks in quiet voices, and they all have Vanishing Day stories:

Amanda from the Joaquin Valley was killing herself in her bathtub when her brother vanished mid-sentence. He was screaming and knocking on her door, and then he wasn’t, and she’d seen enough TV by then to pause her suicide and go check on Andy. No Andy outside, no Andy anywhere.

The Parsons from Tulsa were at a sermon when their daughter Claire vanished from the church. She was wearing a sort of blue that Mrs. Parsons felt contributed to her vanishing. _Erasure blue,_ she calls it _._ She’s brought swatches with her.

A gay couple vanished from the middle of a road, their car careening into a divider and killing their golden retriever in the backseat. Their parents wonder at it: how could something get them in the middle of the road?

There are theories, of course. Some say it’s just wanderlust: people growing tired of families, of responsibilities, of lives carefully constructed with names and IDs and loyalty cards in dozens of grocery stores. That one feels kinda awful, thinks Dean. All these people buying into some mass exodus idea, blowing rudderless like chaff in the wind. Leaving lives and families and names behind. Sam wouldn’t leave like that. (Except he kinda has—multiple times.)

But there are worse theories.

That the missing are dead and their families are victims of a media-created mass hallucination. That the missing have been dead for ages, and any evidence to the contrary is fabricated by the minds of those surviving them. It’s the most easily disputable theory, but Dean’s a little spooked by it. By how possible it is to imagine things, imagine people. He’s still not sure whether he’s dreamed Mary into existence, whether looking too quickly at her will cause her to fade. He has a sudden thought that it’s Mary who’s causing Sam to disappear, all the time. She did it the first time she came back—she could be doing it again. Not her fault, probably, but still. He wonders if he could have lost Sam a while ago and replaced him with Mary, and the lack of an immediate voice yelling _bullshit_ in his ear rattles him.

“I think they just…sublimated,” says Amanda-of-the-bathtub. “Like, you know what the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been saying.”

“That Rapture is here and the ones who left were the lucky ones? That the rest of us are the ones who are wrong, the ones about to suffer a plague of locusts?” Mary’s tone is searing, “That’s nonsense.”

There’s a gaggle of voices after that, accusations. Mary’s seething when they walk out, will not speak in the car. She’s still getting over her afterlife, which she won’t talk about. Dean thinks of the Mary who believed in angels, in God, and loops back around to Sam again.

Sam, who believed in angels once. Who believed in God.

“What is it, Dean?” Mary asks.

If he says _I see him in you_ , he thinks he’ll complete a curse. Or something. It’s stupid—causation doesn’t imply correlation, or whatever. Mary’s his mom. She didn’t make Sam disappear—she couldn’t. Mary’s a person. She’s not someone’s replacement, not a placeholder, not a plot-twist.

Dean can’t go crazy now.

Mary puts her hand over his. Her hands are soft-boned, useful. She says nothing.

 “It’s nothing,” says Dean, “Just hungry.”

*

Sam was probably just wearing _erasure blue._

Dean watches fireworks on July the 4th from some motel room in the middle of nowhere, Mary in the other room, and thinks of every firework in the sky coloring his brother back into this world.

*

Cas has looked everywhere. Which seems like an impossible word— _everywhere—_ but that’s what he says. Up, down, sideways. But there are a hundred worlds, aren’t there. There’s Oz, there’s fairyland. There are centuries of time, each year a different geography. _Everywhere_ isn’t good enough.

“It could be a kind of spontaneous supernatural destruction,” he says hesitantly, quiet on the phone. “You know—”

“Like what Anna wanted to do to him, long back. Like what angels can do.”

Cas is quiet for a beat. “Dean.”

“It’s a theory. Relax.”

Wherever Cas is, something murmurs quiet like a beating heart. It’s a disheartening sound.

“Where are you, Dean?”

He and Mary are in Florida. They’re running into more weirdos than normal, more witches and swamp recluses who say they can scry for Sam in the murky waters of the Okefenokee. Mary knows some witches, can say a curse or two in whatever swamp-voodoo lurks in this place.

Mary thinks she’s probably in her fifties, but she isn’t. She’s still only twenty-eight, maybe thirty. And twenty-eight, maybe thirty Mary gets annoyed if she doesn’t feel like she’s helping.

“Maybe you and Mary should come home,” says Cas.

Even Dean thinks his reply sounds tired. “Not without Sam.”

*

Jody calls and tells Dean to _maybe think of the future,_ and so Dean thinks of the future.

Maybe he goes back to Lebanon. Maybe to Lawrence. Maybe he runs into a hunt. It becomes a catalyst, spurring him into more hunts. Monsters on an assembly line, just waiting for him—ghost, poltergeist, wendigo. Maybe Mary hunts with him. She does the research, he does the cooking, because she only really managed PB&J’s back then with her spanking new family. They talk about things that they always talk about: the weather, the scenery, Sam. Maybe they watch some more shit on Sam’s Netflix account, the password to which is the day Mary died for the first time. Maybe something takes Dean’s arm off, or Mary’s leg off, and they take care of each other. Maybe they turn grey. Maybe he turns grey first, and they find one solemn moment to laugh about it. Maybe it’s actually funny. Maybe she weeps—for the years, for her lost children never quite found, for John. Maybe he does.

Maybe they buy fireworks, and maybe they set them off.

The future feels snug. Taut. He’s not sure where to fit Sam into that. He tries not to think of how it was easier with it being just the two of them—Sam and Dean—how the absence of one undid the other. He’s not allowed that anymore.

Maybe in the future, Mary becomes enough.

*

It’s another July the 4th before a vanished person re-appears.

Dean watches the news from Mary’s apartment. She’s spent today morning peering at mirrors with both terror and enchantment. Mary—at twenty-eight, at thirty—Mary used to wear lipstick. It swims in Dean’s memory, that shade. There’s a very specific memory of her that he has, Mary with a soupspoon, pressing her lips together to spread the color. Mary—back then, Mary; not here now, Mary—with her child-frazzled hair and warped reflection. Now she stands in front of the verdigris-covered mirror, running a hand through her hair. It looks worse after she’s done with it, a little bit like old Mary. Her dress hangs on her like a tarp. It’s that one, the white one. Dean had thought she’d get rid of it. But she’s kept it, and she’s in it, and she looks at herself the way you’d look at Kansas scenery after several hundred miles of it.

Mary is flawed. Mary is beautiful.

“One of the missing people just showed up back in their hometown,” says Dean. Mary hmms, not paying attention. The sun rinsing through a grimy window turns her into a creature of flames.

The TV shows a screaming family. It’s their son that’s come back. They’re all very happy. They’re screaming, they’re so happy. Their screams are too visceral for the microphone, which warps them into electrical _meeps._

Dean feels like screaming too. He thinks he’s heard Mary scream into a towel, once or twice in the last two years, and felt impressed. It must feel better than this, this emptiness building inside of him. Everything crushed into a wall of sound and torn out of the throat. He wonders who taught her. If she would have taught him. If she would have taught Sam.

He switches the television off before the son tells the world where he’d gone.

Maybe this one is an outlier. Maybe whatever took them all decided he didn’t fit their variables. Maybe no one else will come back.

Dean is un-generous with his morsels of hope, but he still imagines reunions.

He thinks of meeting Sam in the dark outside the bunker, shadowed behind the Impala. He thinks of the sunset turning him gold. Dean would stand aside, watch a while, and make sure he’s really there before emerging. If Mary saw him first, she’d step aside. He knows she would. She sees more than she admits out loud, their mother.

And Sam—what would Sam say? None of the others who came back could make sense of what they saw. They were losing sleep. They were gaunt-eyed, homesick for another world they couldn’t remember.

But Sam wouldn’t be like that. He’s been to worse places. He’d been to Hell, he’d battled himself to get back to Dean. He’d kicked Lucifer out, and then Gadreel. There are very few things Dean has some certainty of; Sam’s one of them.

When it’s time, he’d meet Sam in that golden light, and they’d hug, and everything would be back to normal.

*

It’s not a deluge, but a trickle.

When they stop at a diner on their way to meet up with Jody and the girls, Mary brings it up.

“They’re all coming back. In the same order.”

Dean nods. He can’t take his eyes off his plate. It’s just a cheeseburger, but the layers have never been so fascinating.

“Do you know,” asks Mary, scratching a line into the Formica, “do you know the order?”

He doesn’t. How does he tell her that the facts of cases are simply statistics until it takes one of them? How does he tell her that sometimes you do these things over and over again and then it’s all just paint by the numbers, open and shut, words like ‘victims’ and ‘witnesses’ losing any gravity they possess? Mary—who quit hunting, who escaped—Mary knows only the tip of the iceberg. Mary knows her dead brother, but not the struggle of keeping one alive. Mary knows monsters, but not how to work with them. Mary knows her family’s hunts, not the hunts of two lone men.

Sam could’ve been number 80 or number 129. No one was paying attention.

*

Another year before the media starts reporting that it’s nearly all of them—all of the missing.

All of the _reported_ missing, at least.

Sam, of course, never even featured in that statistic.

Dean and Mary find them in support groups and in therapist’s offices, at homes and in offices. Dean asks the questions and Mary sneaks in to steal files and recordings. None of them ever saw each other. They only saw dreams. There were good dreams and bad ones, and sometimes they saw glimpses of a strange place. They still see it in their sleep. It was a quiet place, a place of peace. A place of nightmares, as well.

They never want to go back. They want to go back.

“You didn’t meet anyone else?” Dean asks, the last question always, “My brother’s still missing. This is his picture. You never saw him?”

Thanks. Okay. Okay. Adios.

*

They’re in Texas. At night behind the motel’s parking lot, Texas smells of okay flowers and gasoline and burnt plastic. Dean leaves Mary to pack and walks into the night a little. He counts numbers. He prays for one to feel significant.

 _Maybe Sam didn’t want to come back,_ he thinks. He feels a momentary flash of anger, a single spark of hate. But it’s gone just as quickly. Sam never asked for this—for any of this.

He tells the darkness that if only he could know what happened to Sam, if only he could know where Sam was, he’d do anything it tells him. No one answers back.

The moon casts shadows like fingers. The stars spin, drag through the sludge of air pollution, swirls into extraordinary maps. Dean loses count, loses the motel, and comes back wreathed in a lumbering sunrise to Mary sitting on the ground in front of his room.

Her mouth falls open when she sees him. “I thought—” she says, and flings her arms around him.

She’s too fierce to cry, but her nails leave purple fingernail moons on Dean’s back.

This too, Dean thinks, is love.

*

There’s no golden light.

No shadow, no bunker.

Dean wakes up, sleep-drugged and hot under his covers in a non-descript motel room. Mary’s shouting his name, her voice urgent and breathless. He grabs his gun, stumbles out of his door and reaches his mother in a run, and then he just stands there, hands in his pockets. Mary’s already sitting on the ground with Sam. She’s struck silent now that Dean’s here, her fingers fluttering quietly and efficiently over Sam, checking him for injuries.

Sam’s fingers curl into the fabric at the knees of Dean’s jeans, then finds the hem of his shirt. He drags Dean down and Dean goes crashing, and Sam stares at him wild-eyed and bloody. The light from the motel’s sputtering neon sign stripes him in red, makes him bloodier.

Dean looks at him—alive, splattered in dark gore—and thinks he knows why that first family couldn’t stop screaming.

“Did I get them all out?” Sam rasps, and Dean counts the last number, everyone plus Sam, and nods.

His fingers are still threaded into Dean’s jacket, but he smiles wearily, and when the motel light sizzles out, and the darkness wraps around them, all Dean can think is _thank you, thank you, thank you._

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
